The Oslo Bioinformatics Workshop Week (OBiWoW) was aimed at reaching the bioinformatics community and anyone who wants to learn bioinformatics regardless of academic background and level. Between 200-250 participants attended the workshops, and some participants attended two or more workshops.
Before planning the workshop week, the organising group first sent out a questionnaire with various questions aimed at understanding the needs of the scientific community in Oslo in terms of Bioinformatics skills/knowledge.
– Some of the questions we asked were, ‘what is your scientific background’ and ‘what is your current position’. The result of the survey as summarized in the following figure indicates that the community who participated in the survey and are interested in the bioinformatics workshop week have diverse scientific background and a range of academic and career levels reflecting our aim of being open and reaching out to anyone with a bioinformatics interest, Roza and Tatiana explain.
The value of sharing practical knowledge
We caught up with the organisers to find out how the workshop week went and what were some of their personal highlights from the week.
Roza:
– I enjoyed the fact that OBiWoW2022 covered a range of topics from Introductory level bioinformatics (e.g. (1) ‘Bioinformatics beginner's course - an introduction to whole genome sequencing’ and (2) Introduction to gene expression regulation by transcription factors and its computational analysis) to advanced and more specific topics such as (1)Statistical principles in machine learning for small biomedical data, (2) Multi-omics data integration analysis and (3) Responsible development in Machine learning.
– This indicates that there is at-least one workshop that meets the need/interest, academic level and diverse background of anyone in the community indicating the inclusive nature of the workshop. I found the diverse nature of the workshop, both in topics and advancement level, to be highly valuable. As much as possible, I myself tried to attend at-least one workshop every day during the week and witnessed that both the participants and the workshop instructors are excited to be at the workshop. – The workshop week created a nice environment for interesting discussions within the topics of the workshop, it provided networking opportunities and potential collaborations. I really enjoyed witnessing these along with the continuous in person feedback we received both from workshop attendees and instructors indicating that this is an excellent event, they enjoyed the workshops, and that they really would like to see this happening again. To have all these positive feedbacks and witness the excitement and enthusiasm of everyone involved in the workshop is quite fulfilling. Tatiana:
– I really enjoyed the format of OBiWoW2022. First of all, as Roza mentioned there was a wide variety of topics to attend. Secondly, I think having hands-on bioinformatic experience rather than just a lecture is always more exciting, as you can follow the detailed steps of how analysis is done, and apply what you learnt in the workshop in your own research. We were also happy to have very enthusiastic and knowledgeable instructors who created a comfortable learning workshop environment.
Bayram:
– Both as an instructor and attendant, I really enjoyed the idea of sharing knowledge/experience on such a workshop. Sharing practical knowledge in a workshop is quite valuable in different aspects like it saves your time compared to learning alone and also it helps you to extend your network in the field. In this workshop I met with many people who are focusing on quite similar problems that I am also dealing with and I have the feeling that this may lead to some possible collaborations in the future.
Mohamed:
– The days of OBiWoW 2022 were a really good example of how few volunteer members can arrange such extensive events, we had very good communication with each other even though some of us know each other for the first time. What I also value during this week is the great response and feedback we get from both participants and instructors.
Jeanne:
– I gained valuable insight on organizing such events with a really committed organizing committee. It also always nice to see the willingness of the research community to participate in sharing their knowledge, either as a teacher or a student. Finally, I am happy to see that the collective effort of the organizer and the instructors paid off and that most attendees have enjoyed the event and have positive feedback on the workshops.
Bringing the scientific community together
Roza:
– I strongly believe that the workshop has managed to bring together the scientific community in Oslo from different academic and career backgrounds. It also managed to recruit various highly enthusiastic instructors who dedicated their time, skill and energy to share their excellently designed workshops with the enthusiastic attendees. We have instructors not only from Oslo but also from NMBU, UiT and SciLife lab in Sweden. This reflects how the community is determined to share the skill and knowledge they have with others, all free of charge. This gives a greater implication that there truly is a sense of community profiting from one another and learning from one another. This in my opinion is a value of great magnitude. It gives me a great pleasure to be part of this community and being part of the OBiWoW organizing committee. I believe that this workshop has a potential to grow into something big, perhaps a yearly event that could become a valuable joint effort between two large faculties (MatNat and MedFak) at UiO. The success of OBiWOW2022 would have not happened without the enthusiastic and excellent workshop instructors' involvement and without the dedicated workshop attendees. We would like to thank both for their participation and for making the first bioinformatics workshop week a success.
Tatiana:
– After each session, we asked participants to fill out an evaluation form. Many responders rated the quality of the workshop as very good, which makes me very happy!I hope that such workshops will have an impact on their own research, as they can use specific techniques and analyses in their own work. And that for some, who just started with bioinformatics and took the bioinformatics introductory workshop, it was an encouragement to continue learning and that it is not that difficult to start programming and analyzing big biological data as it might seem.
Bayram:
– In my perspective, I find OBiWOW2022 quite valuable to grasp different the concepts in Bioinformatics. In interdisciplinary fields like Bioinformatics, researchers may have different backgrounds and it would be time consuming to exceed learning curve of new concepts. In this sense, I find this workshop quite beneficial for researchers from different level&field to improve their practical/conceptual knowledge in various fields. Furthermore, another important aspect was to being able to organize this meeting physically just after pandemic. My observation is such workshops are more effective when they are done in physical classes.
Mohamed:
– I think OBiWoW shows how strong the bioinformatics community in Oslo, also how diverse the topic of bioinformatics can be. I see that the future of such events can be really good. Finally, I'm really happy to be part of the organizing team
Jeanne:
– Organizing an open event like OBiWOW is important for the Oslo scientific community. It fostered a good atmosphere for students to learn new things and teachers to get feedback on their tools/methods/research. I think the free access to these workshops also allowed students to be more open to discover new areas or perspective on their research, which is invaluable in a multidisciplinary discipline such as bioinformatics.
Oslo Bioinformatics Workshop Week team
The ObiWoW team are composed of 6 members as of today, of which half of them are from Medical faculty (two from NCMM and one from IMB) and the rest are from MatNat, center for Bioinformatics. The members are:
- Lex Nederbragt: Workshop team leader
- Jeanne Cheneby
- Bayram Akdeniz
- Mohamed Abdelhalim
- Tatiana Belova and
- Roza Berhanu Lemma
- In addition, Roberto Rossini from IBV, UiO contributed to the planning ahead of the OBiWoW2022